Metaphysics - by Alexander Baumgarten (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Now available for the first time in English, this critical translation of Metaphysica draws from the original seven Latin editions, the Academy edition of Kant, and Georg Friedrich Meier's 18th-century German translation. To assist and support the reading of this crucial text, the translation features:

* historical and philosophical introductions and sketches
* extensive glossaries and notes
* clear reproductions of Kant's elucidations and handwritten notes
* Eberhard's insertions in the 1783 German edition

Used as a philosophical instruction for thinkers such as Kant, Mendelssohn, Abbt, Herder, and Maimon, Metaphysica is arguably one of philosophy's most influential texts. Equipped with supportive and illuminating introductory material, this clear and lucid translation presents scholars of Kant, German philosophy and the history of philosophy with an indispensable resource.

Review Quotes

Baumgarten's manual was enormously influential and widely discussed in Kant's time in matters such as metaphysics, cosmology, and psychology. Kant used it repeatedly in many of his courses and annotated it extensively. This volume offers the first full translation of Baumgarten's Metaphysics (in its fourth, 1757 edition) in English, inclusive of Kant's hand-written elucidations. It is a very welcome addition to the primary sources available to scholars. The current state of debate makes this a timely contribution that will help anyone interested in Kant to gauge in a more accurate and historically informed fashion the extent of his relation to his eighteenth-century German predecessors. Fugate and Hymers' rich, attentive and scrupulous critical notes never make the reader feel unassisted in this undertaking.
Karl Ameriks, McMahon-Hank Professor of Philosophy, University of Notre Dame, USA

Baumgarten's Metaphysica was both a refined restatement of the German rationalism of Leibniz and Wolff and an original work of philosophy. Not merely the textbook for Immanuel Kant's lectures on metaphysics and anthropology, it fundamentally shaped Kant's "Critical Philosophy" and through that most of later German philosophy. This lucid translation finally makes Baumgarten's seminal work available in English . . . indispensable for all future students of Kant and German philosophy.
Julian Wuerth, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Vanderbilt University USA

Of all the philosophical works of Kant's predecessors and contemporaries that have remained untranslated into English in their entirety, Alexander Baumgarten's Metaphysics is likely the most important for an understanding of Kant's theoretical philosophy. But Fugate and Hymers' volume goes well beyond what we could have reasonably hoped for. It provides not only a meticulous translation of Baumgarten's Metaphysics and lengthy notes on the translation, but also an overview of Baumgarten's life and philosophy, an assessment of the relations of this philosophy to the philosophies of Wolff, Leibniz, Meier, and Kant; a translation of all of Kant's Erläuterungen (elucidations) of Baumgarten's text; and an extensive glossary and index. Fugate and Hymers have simply produced an exceptional volume that will be of great value to Kant scholarship, and we can only hope that they will engage in similar translation projects in the future.
Jeffrey Edwards, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Stony Brook University, USA

About the Author

Alexander Baumgarten (1714 - 1762) was among the first to teach the controversial philosophy of Christian Wolff (1769-1764). His most influential philosophical works are Metaphysics (1739), Philosophical Ethics (1740), and Aesthetics (2 Vols, 1750 & 1757). Today Baumgarten is also regarded as a central founder of modern aesthetics.
John Hymers is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at La Salle University, USA.
Courtney D. Fugate is Assistant Professor at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon.